Peter Binzen, Dean of Philadelphia Journalism for Half a Century, Dies at 94

Peter Binzen, a newspaperman who covered Philadelphia for more than five decades and whose books presciently explored the frustrations of working-class Americans, the rise of Mayor Frank L. Rizzo as their bellicose local political hero and the bankruptcy of the Penn Central railroad, died on Nov. 16 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 94.

The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Katherine said.

As a reporter, columnist and editor, Mr. Binzen spent 31 years at The Evening and Sunday Bulletin, specializing in education and urban affairs. After The Bulletin closed in 1982, he was recruited to The Philadelphia Inquirer by Gene Roberts, who was the paper’s executive editor and later became the managing editor of The New York Times. The two had met as Nieman fellows at Harvard.

Mr. Binzen wrote a business column for The Inquirer and continued to write for the op-ed page even after he retired in 2003.

“If there were such a thing as dean of Philadelphia journalism, Peter would have been it,” Mr. Roberts said. As a Nieman fellow, he added, Mr. Binzen “became a guru to the younger journalists, of which I was one.”

Mr. Binzen began researching his first book, “Whitetown, USA,” as a Nieman fellow. He had received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to pursue the book, an exploration of the blue-collar residents of Philadelphia’s industrial Kensington neighborhood, which one reviewer likened more to Birmingham, Ala., than to the City of Brotherly Love.

Published in 1970, the book was a sympathetic though not necessarily admiring portrait of President Richard M. Nixon’s newly expressive silent majority. It concluded, “We neglect the working American at our peril.”

His next two books were written with Joseph R. Daughen, a Bulletin colleague.

The first, “The Wreck of the Penn Central” (1971), chronicled the 867 days between the ill-fated merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads and the combined corporation’s bankruptcy.

Reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, Robert Townsend, a former chairman and president of Avis, wrote that the book destroyed the myth that corporate boards oversee company officials by showing that “the directors are in bed with the management.”

Mr. Binzen and Mr. Daughen collaborated again on “The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo” (1977), portraying Mr. Rizzo as a former police officer who surfed a wave of law-and-order oratory, only to sink in what the authors described as a catastrophic mayoralty.

In 2014, with his son, Jonathan P. Binzen, Mr. Binzen wrote “Richardson Dilworth: Last of the Bare-Knuckled Aristocrats,” a portrait of another magnetic Philadelphia mayor.

Peter Husted Binzen was born on Sept. 24, 1922, in Montclair, N.J., the son of Frederick Binzen, a vice president of J. C. Penney, and the former Lucy Husted.

He graduated from Montclair High School, took time off from Yale to fight with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Italy during World War II, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1947.

His wife, the former Virginia Flower, died in 2007. In addition to his son and his daughter Katherine, he is survived by two other daughters, Lucy Wildrick and Jennifer Cardoso, and nine grandchildren.

After college, he decided against law school, sold subscriptions at a New Jersey weekly, freelanced, worked briefly for United Press, and joined The Bulletin in 1951.

“It was said that if a housewife sitting on her front stoop saw a fire engine go by in the morning, she could learn where it went by reading The Bulletin in the afternoon,” Mr. Binzen told the Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society in 2003.

In an interview last year with PhillyVoice.com, Mr. Binzen noted how much his adopted hometown had, like Brooklyn, become ascendant.

“You know there used to be a saying that Philadelphia back then was duller than seven Sundays in Flatbush,” he said. “I guess none of that is true anymore.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Peter Binzen, 94, Covered Philadelphia’s Stories. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe